The City in the Clouds

She blushed again, upon my soul she did, and I heard Williams gasp in astonishment. I kicked him, under the table.

"The other bed-sitting room at 'Balmoral' has recently been occupied by a young man, perhaps I should rather say a youth, Mr. William Rolston. He seemed very lonely and quite poor, and on discussing him with Mrs. O'Hagan, my landlady, she informed me that she more than suspected that he had at times to economize grievously in the matter of food. I myself used to hear the click of a typewriter across the passage, sometimes continuing till late at night, and from the frequency with which bulky envelopes arrived for him by post, it was easy to deduce that he was an unsuccessful author or journalist. This naturally excited my interest. Mrs. O'Hagan has no idea that I am connected with the Evening Special, she thinks I am typist in a city firm of hardware merchants. And when I made my acquaintance with Mr. Rolston, as I did some time ago owing to his back number Remington going wrong, I told him nothing but that I myself was a typist and stenographer. I was enabled to put his machine right and we became friends. Am I boring you, Sir Thomas, and Mr. Williams?" she said suddenly, with a quick look at both of us.

"On the contrary," I replied, "you are paying us a great compliment, Miss Dewsbury, in allowing us to know something of your own private affairs in order that you may explain how you propose to do the paper a signal service."

I can swear that the little woman's eyes grew bright behind her tortoise-shell spectacles and she went on with renewed confidence of manner.

"I have been associated with journalism for eight years now," she said. "During that time innumerable journalists have passed before me. In my own way I have studied them all, and I believe I can detect the real journalist almost as well as Mr. Williams can."

"A good deal better, I should think," said the acting editor, "considering the people I have trusted and the mistakes I have sometimes made."

"At any rate, I can say, with my whole heart, that Bill – I mean Mr. Rolston – though he is only twenty-one and has never had a chance in his life yet, has the makings in him of the most successful journalist of the day. He will rise to the very top of the tree. But as we all know, though great merit will come to the surface in time, chance is a great element in retarding or accelerating the process. I think that Mr. Rolston's chance has come now."

"You mean?" I asked.

"That this boy, utterly unknown, with hardly a left foot in Fleet Street as yet, has had the acumen to see, right to his hand, one of the greatest journalistic sensations of modern times. I refer to the three towers on Richmond Hill. We have been for evening strolls together and the boy has poured out his whole heart to me – as he might to a mother or any older woman" – and here poor Julia blushed again, and I thought I saw her lips quiver for a moment.

"The day before yesterday he said to me: 'Miss Dewsbury, of course you don't understand anything about journalism, but I'm on the track of the very biggest thing you could possibly imagine. I have been lying low and saying nothing. I'm hot on the scent.' He hinted at what it was, without giving me very many details, though these were quite sufficient to show me that he was making no idle boast. Then he said: 'But what use is it? If I went with what I've got already to any of the papers, I might or might not get to see some unimaginative news-editor who'd squash me into a cocked hat in five minutes. That's the worst of being absolutely unknown and without any pull. If only I could get to see a real editor of one of the big papers, a man who would give me a patient hearing, a man with imagination, I would engage to convince him in ten minutes and my fortune would be made.'"

She stopped, leant back in her chair and looked at me inquiringly.

"Good heavens!" I cried. "Have him up at once. I am quite certain that you could never have been deceived, Miss Dewsbury. You have not been with me for four years without my knowing how valuable your intuition is. Send him to me at once."

Miss Dewsbury gave a dry, gratified chuckle.

"I may have stretched things a little far in having too much confidence in my position here," she said, "but I was determined to gamble on it, and I've won. This morning, before I left for the office, I gave Mrs. O'Hagan a little note for Bill – he has an unfortunate habit of lying in bed in the morning. The note told him that by an odd coincidence, I thought I might put him in the way of writing an article for the Evening Special and that he was to be in the café at the corner by three o'clock, precisely."

She looked at her wrist-watch.

"It's five minutes to now. I will send for him at once."

"Rolston, did you say the name was, Miss Dewsbury?" said Williams.

"Yes, – Rolston. But the messenger can't mistake him. He's about five feet two high, very slim, with an innocent, baby face, and very dark red hair. Oh, and his ears stick out at the sides of his head almost at right angles. Please say nothing about my part in the matter, as yet at any rate," Miss Dewsbury asked as she went away, and some minutes afterwards a page boy ushered in one of the most curious little figures I have ever seen.

Mr. Rolston was short, slim and well proportioned. He looked active as a monkey and tough as whipcord. He was rather shabbily dressed in an old blue suit. His face was childish only in contour and complexion, and for the rest he could have sat as a model for Puck to any painter. There was something impish and merry in his rather slanting eyes, and his button of a mouth was capable of some very surprising contortions. His round-shaped ears, like the ears of a mouse, stood out on each side of his head and completed the elfish, sprite-like impression.

"Sit down, Mr. Rolston," I said, pointing to a chair on the other side of the table.

The little man bowed very low and slid into the chair. I had an odd impression that he would shortly produce a nut and begin to crack it with his teeth. I could see that he was in a whirl of amazement and at the same time horribly nervous, and I tried to put him at his ease.

"I understand," I said, "that you are a journalist, Mr. Rolston."

"Yes, Sir Thomas," he replied, in a cultivated voice, though with a curious guttural note in it, and I marked that he knew my name.

"I also understand – never mind how – that for some time past you have been wishing to see the editor of a large London daily, to penetrate right to the fountain head, so to speak. Well, here you are, I am the editor of the Evening Special. What have you to propose to me?"

I passed a box of cigarettes over the table towards him, but he shook his head.

"It's about the three great towers now approaching completion at Richmond."

"You have some special information?"

"Some very startling information, indeed, Sir Thomas. An idea came to me some months ago. I thought it worth while testing, and it's proved trumps."

"If you have anything in the nature of a scoop, Mr. Rolston, I need hardly say that it will be very well worth your while. If, when I have heard what you have to say, I cannot use your information, I will give you my personal word that all you tell me shall be kept an entire secret."

"That's good enough for any one," he answered with a sudden grin. "Well, sir, these towers will eventually lapse to the British Government as a gift from the private individual who has erected them, but they will remain his property and be used for his own purposes until his death. And these purposes are not wireless telegraphy, or even scientific in any shape or form. Indeed, wireless telegraphy is expressly forbidden."

Well, at that I sat upright in my chair. Here was news indeed – if it were true.

"That's big stuff," I replied at once, "if you can substantiate it."

"I think you will believe me when I have finished," he replied quietly. "I have risked my life more than once to get at the facts. My father, Sir Thomas, was a missionary in China. I was brought up to speak the Chinese language as well as English. I am one of the very few Europeans who do so fluently. Moreover, I kept it up till I was sixteen and came to England, and I have never forgotten it. You have heard, I suppose, that there's a gang of Chinese coolies at work on the towers, and some of the Trade Unions have been making themselves nasty about it, and the American labor?"

"Yes, there was some agitation."

"In addition to these coolies, there are many Chinese officials of a much higher class, people who will remain when the towers are finished, as they will be in an incredibly short space of time, for the work is being carried on both by day and night. Speed, speed, speed! is the order, and nothing in the world is allowed to stand in the way of it."

"You interest me very much. Please continue."

"Speaking Chinese as I do, being perfectly familiar with Chinese dress and customs, it has not been difficult for me to disguise myself – blacken my hair, assume a yellow complexion and so forth.

"By this means I have penetrated to the very heart of the workings at night, and," he blushed faintly, "I have listened to conversations of an extraordinary character, lying on the roof of a certain office building for hours. Details you shall have, and in plenty, but here is the sum of my discoveries. There is no syndicate. There never was. The work, upon which millions have been spent, has been, from the very first, designed and originated by one individual, with the specialized help of the most famous engineers of America."

"And his motive?" I asked, and I don't mind saying that I was almost trembling with excitement.

"The dream of a genius, or the whim of a madman," Rolston answered in a grave voice. "The world will call it one or the other without a doubt. At any rate it's the product of a colossal imagination. For myself, I am dead certain that there's some deeper and stranger motive beneath it all, but that can rest for the present. Sir Thomas, between those three great towers, two thousand feet up in the air, will very shortly come into being a fantastic pleasure city like a dream of the Arabian Nights! It will be unique in the history of the world, and already the preparations are so far advanced that it will be completed with extraordinary rapidity."

"A pleasure city!" I gasped. "A Pleasure City in the Clouds!"

"On two stages right up at the very summit, suspended by a system of cantilevers of the most intricate modern construction and of toughened steel. I understand that a triangle measuring in all four acres will support a marvelous series of palaces, a Lhassa of the air!"

"Why Lhassa, Mr. Rolston?"

"Because," he replied, "it's to be a Forbidden City, which no one will be allowed to penetrate or see. It is a marvelous conception only possible to enormous wealth and the vision of a superman."

I left my chair and began pacing up and down the room as the freakish grandeur of the conception burst fully upon me. Towering over London, dwarfing Saint Paul's to a child's toy, a City in the Clouds!

I stopped suddenly, wheeled round and shouted: "But who, Mr. Rolston, is the madman, genius or superman who has imagined this and actually carried it out in sober twentieth-century England?"

"That's the greatest secret of all," he said, looking round the room as if frightened.

Then he slid from his chair and was at my side in a moment.

"It's a Mr. Gideon Mendoza Morse from Brazil," he whispered.

CHAPTER THREE